Quote:Towards a Transmaterialist Science of the Sacred with Bernard Carr and Alex Gomez-Marin
From the series Recovering the Sacred
Science is traditionally associated with the material world but in this conversation Bernard (President of the Scientific and Medical Network) and Alex (Director of the Pari Center) will discuss whether, and to what extent, it can be expanded to accommodate the worlds of mind and spirit. This is the remit of what is sometimes termed ‘postmaterialist’ science, although ‘transmaterialist science’ is another possible designation, this requiring a change in the nature of both science and scientists themselves. From this perspective, the sacred can be found in all three worlds and not just the domain of spirit. While materialist science can neither prove nor disprove the existence of a divine element in the universe, an expanded version may reinforce the link between science and spirituality, thus healing a bifurcation that harms both our planet and our humanity. The conversation will include a brief presentation in which Bernard introduces his hyperdimensional theory, this unifying the three worlds by invoking extra dimensions beyond ordinary space and time. This suggests that consciousness is fundamental and not necessarily restricted to brains, with evolution operating on the level of mind and spirit as well as body. This is congruent with Alex’s research as a neuroscientist, investigating the strong version of the extended mind hypothesis, in which memory and perception are non-local and the brain has a permissive rather than a productive function.
Consciousness is also associated with life, which might itself be regarded as sacred. But there may be forms of life beyond our own planet and the discovery of extraterrestrial intelligence would surely have a huge impact on humanity—technologically, culturally and spiritually. The future scientist will need to be a well-versed practitioner of the science of the sacred.
Bernard Carr is Emeritus Professor of Mathematics and Astronomy at Queen Mary University of London. His professional area of research is cosmology and astrophysics and includes such topics as the early universe, dark matter, black holes and the anthropic principle. For his PhD he studied the first second of the Universe, working under the supervision of Stephen Hawking at the Institute of Astronomy in Cambridge and the California Institute of Technology. He was elected to a Fellowship at Trinity College, Cambridge, in 1975 and moved to Queen Mary College in 1985. He has also held Visiting Professorships at Kyoto University, Tokyo University, the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory and the Canadian Institute for Theoretical Astrophysics. He is the author of nearly three hundred scientific papers and the books Universe or Multiverse?and Quantum Black Holes. Beyond his professional field, he is interested in the role of consciousness in physics and in an expanded paradigm which accommodates mind. He also has a long-standing interest in the relationship between science and religion. He was President of the Society for Psychical Research in 2000-2004 and is currently President of the Scientific and Medical Network.
Àlex Gómez-Marín is a Spanish physicist turned neuroscientist. He holds a PhD in theoretical physics and a Masters in biophysics from the University of Barcelona. He was a research fellow at the EMBL-CRG Centre for Genomic Regulation and at the Champalimaud Center for the Unknown in Lisbon. His research spans from the origins of the arrow of time to the neurobiology of action-perception in flies, worms, mice, humans and robots. Since 2016 he is the head of the Behavior of Organisms Laboratory at the Instituto de Neurociencias in Alicante, where he is an Associate Professor of the Spanish Research Council. Combining high-resolution experiments, computational and theoretical biology, and continental philosophy, his latest research concentrates on real-life cognition and consciousness.
'Historically, we may regard materialism as a system of dogma set up to combat orthodox dogma...Accordingly we find that, as ancient orthodoxies disintegrate, materialism more and more gives way to scepticism.'
- Bertrand Russell
- Bertrand Russell
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